My puppy Charlie loves to dig, like his predecessor, Lucy, who was an expert at locating, excavating, and dispatching moles from my backyard. Charlie has yet to pull out a mole, but he’s trying to learn how, and the other day he did find one interesting artifact: my late husband Cary’s old fire glove.
It was one of those huge gloves that serious outdoor cooks use for the grill and for firepits. Cary kept his handy all the time, but one day, one glove disappeared. We both suspected that Lucy had gotten it and chewed it up, but we couldn’t imagine her eating the oversized glove, made of heavy leather. Still, it was nowhere to be found, and Cary gave up after checking around in the yard. I don’t remember if he kept its mate somewhere when he bought another pair, but I think it was eventually thrown away.
Lucy was my best friend for five years after Cary died. She was also a working dog, a Blue Heeler like Charlie, and she earned her keep not only by keeping my yard mole-free, but by being my loyal companion.
One day a year or two after the glove disappeared, I had cleared the leaves and weeds out of the “wild” area of the yard, and I saw something odd sticking up out of the ground. I leaned over and tried to pull on it, but it was almost completely buried, so I stopped and laughed. It was the lost glove. Lucy had buried it a few feet away from the hollow tree where the owls nest. When I found it, Lucy was still alive, but she had stopped caring about it. She may have forgotten about it. Squirrels forget about 60 to 80% of the nuts they bury, but she was so much smarter than a squirrel. I figure she knew it wasn’t edible and that hiding it had been her goal that day.
The one time she stole and hid an eight-pack of peanut butter and cracker sandwiches, she dug them up and brought one back to the deck. I saw her with it, and at first I thought it was a dead cardinal, about the right size and shape for one. I panicked and made her give it to me, and realized I’d only seen the red Ritz logo on it. She always made me laugh.
I miss Lucy; when an extended family member had a litter of Blue Heeler pups six months after she died, I gave up the idea of getting a much smaller dog sometime and nabbed the last one, who’s a male but looks a lot like Lucy. I’d always wished we’d gotten Lucy as a puppy so we could have watched her grow up.
Now Charlie has been a handful. He has his own ways of doing things. A small part of him is most likely Australian Shepherd, although I haven’t had his DNA tested yet. He’s bossy like Lucy, loves to dig, is a very dedicated chewer, and is more snuggly than the adult Lucy we adopted when she was approximately a year old.
But Charlie likes to steal household objects and prance around with them until I bribe him to “Let go!’ with a treat. I bribe him because if left alone, he will proceed to eat these objects: socks, shirts, towels, pillows, blankets, and bedspreads. He not only eats cloth items. He’s been known to eat one end of an orange Chuck-It “Air Fetch” football, made in a lattice pattern so dogs can breathe while carrying it, and a whole Chuck-It “Air Fetch” tennis ball, maybe two, in the space of a week. I discovered the football and took it away quickly, but I stupidly thought, “Surely he won’t eat the tennis balls.”
When chunks of the balls began appearing in my green grass along with his poop, I thought, “Oh, no,” but a few days later when he wouldn’t eat his breakfast and threw up an orange chunk along with the treats I’d given him, I called the vet. They told me to bring him right away and spent the day (and $500 of mine) x-raying him several times to track the pieces moseying along in his digestive tract.
Since then, he’s eaten quite a few items of contraband, some of which I was able to retrieve with a hydrogen peroxide home remedy the poison control vet once gave me, after Lucy had eaten a whole bag of glucosamine chews.
I haven’t taken him back to the vet for these additional mishaps. I’ve written in other posts that Blue Heelers were bred from English cattle dogs crossed with dingos in Australia, and I think that’s why they’re such hardy dogs. However, I do try my very best to keep wool coasters, my prescription bottles, and bath rugs out of his mouth and out of his reach.
Back to the story about the leather glove. One day, as I mentioned, Charlie found it. I’d forgotten about it, but I knew he had been digging, and he was running around with thin pieces of leather in his mouth, each of which I bribed him for, and bits of red trim that must have been some kind of cloth. I went out looking in the yard to try to figure it out. It didn’t take long to find the glove when I saw the hole he’d begun. He’d only dug up the exposed thumb, far from the whole thing, and the parts he’d gotten were much thinner than they originally had been.
I did my own digging. I grabbed it, pulled hard, got the rest of the glove out, and threw it away. I spent the next few days trading him puppy sausage bits for pieces of leather. I’m pretty sure my lawn crew had run over it with the riding mower, tearing it into about fifty almost bite-sized pieces. I dutifully tried to pick up every piece I could find. It reminded me of the demise of the ring I wrote about that was run over by a lawn mower in my parents’ yard many years ago. It had had a beautiful stone in it, but all I found was the mangled gold setting.
The glove connected Charlie to Lucy and Cary. I’m happy he found it, in a way, to form a concrete connection with those from the past that he’ll never get to meet.
Charlie would have loved to meet Lucy; I’m not sure Lucy would have wanted to put up with Charlie.
For those who aren’t offended by seeing a dead mole, here is the prize Lucy got that day, and here I am trying to get her to let it go.
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